New car reviews

2012 Audi A7

Audi A7 5-door and 4-seat hatch-coupe has supercharged power

Bob Plunkett, Sat, 17 Sep 2011 02:19:40 PDT

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- From the southbound lane of State Street in Ann Arbor, a right turn into the freeway on-ramp for I-94, USA's northern interstate corridor, leads westward across Michigan toward Chicago, Minneapolis and, if you keep on driving, the end of the road on Puget Sound at Seattle.

For this shot on I-94, our drive plan doesn't include such an ambitious trek as we're only running a few miles out to the Mich. 52 exit at Chelsea, but that's long enough to feel the super strength at freeway speed for a luxurious new car that's stunning in style with a projectile prow and pronounced shoulders yet a graceful arch of roof rails sweeping back to a blunted rump.

Our vehicle -- the latest clever concept from Audi of Germany -- carries a badge of A7 and slots into the mid-size class in configuration with a 2+2 cockpit and four doors for passengers plus a tail-side portal.

With a low roofline and integrated rear doors, the A7 looks sleek and swift like a curve-craving coupe, yet it provides the four cabin doors of a practical sedan and carves out additional cargo room in the hind quarters like a functional wagon.

It's as if Audi's designers tossed a coupe, sedan and wagon into a gigantic blender and mixed all ingredients until the sleek A7 emerged.

Then Audi stocks the A7 with serious performance hardware including a powerful engine enhanced with supercharger and an eight-speed Tiptronic automatic shifter plus electronics governing all aspects of the car's dynamic movements as well as communications, navigation, comfort, even entertainment.

And weight-saving aluminum components make the suspension, tuned and tweaked for precise and predictable action, feel light and lively, while Audi's Quattro all-wheel-drive (AWD) system for traction at every wheel sets up the tire grip of a sidewinder snake in sand.

Using a self-locking center differential with rear-biased torque split, the Quattro device automatically shifts the majority of all engine torque to whichever wheels, front or rear, attain the best bite of traction.

Normal operation divides the engine's torque at 40/60 percent (front/rear), so the torque bias works like a rear-wheel-drive (RWD) car. Yet with wheel slippage the differential can channel more than 60 percent of the power to the front wheels or more than 75 percent to rear wheels.

Another mechanism applies electronic locking to front and rear differentials in a process that can sense and block an individual wheel from spinning, then redistribute the driving torque from one side of the axle to the other.

Steering, using a rack and pinion arrangement, is quick and Servotronic power assistance is standard, varying the degree of boost according to road speed.

Brakes, with a big disc at each wheel, rely on electronic and computerized links to tame the tires. Anti-lock brake (ABS) controls are standard, along with electronic brake distribution (EBD) plus Audi's electronic stabilization program (ESP) which automatically checks lateral vehicle slippage and skidding.